This is exactly what I think. I often rant about how everybody needs to learn to program, but what I mean is not so much being able to write code in a specific

This is exactly what I think. I often rant about how everybody needs to learn to program, but what I mean is not so much being able to write code in a specific language as the mindset of approaching problems, and having an understanding of how a computer works. Today programmers are in a sense the gatekeepers of information and I don't think that's healthy in the long term. There are several layers to this. In general, I think people older than ~50 approach computers in a totally different way than people younger than ~20, with us in the middle a little spread out. A good friend's father, for instance, used to hit Space in his word processor to center headings. He didn't do this because he didn't find the button for center alignment, he did it because he didn't think to look for it. Another dad recently bought a new Android phone. He was studying the rather thick manual carefully, while his 10 year old daughter grabbed the phone, snapped a picture and just started using it. Startled, her father asked her how she knew all this stuff, to which she replied that she didn't know how to do it beforehand, she just did what seemed reasonable. It might be a stretch, but I think that programming is on the same range of using computers (tools in general? I don't know) in this way. Solving problems is basically trying what seems most reasonable first. A well defined API is usable without even consulting the documentation. I definitely think that teaching basic programming and computer science to everybody would be a huge win to society. Sometimes I think of myself as a literate monk in medieval times. I imagine that lots of people would request their services, friends and family needing help with writing and reading. This is also one of the biggest reasons for my wanting more people to learn how to program: It's purely selfish, I get awfully stressed by having people come to me with ideas they can't implement, trying to make me do it for them. I'm sure a lot of people here have similar experiences.